There’s a recurring dream that I have, about once a year. In this dream I’m in college – I’m my real age, but I’m in college - and I’m at the final exam of a course that I know I signed up for, but never went to class or did any of the reading. I know I’m not the only one to have this particular dream; and it’s a common type of dream: one in which we find ourselves in a situation we should be prepared for, and aren’t. It’s rooted in the sense of inadequacy that most of us have to some degree or other. But the anxiety about tests is a way it commonly shows up; we get that anxiety in grade school, and most of us never entirely shake it. But as we progress through the educational system, hopefully we learn something different about tests: that they’re not intended just to expose us (although that what it usually feels like.) In high school or college, you may have heard from your teachers that a test should be a learning experience. A good test doesn’t simply ask you to regurgitate stuff you’ve memorized; it gives you an opportunity to see how the things you’ve been learning about come together, to connect the dots, to get a sense of the whole. What’s the course really about? What are the main things the teacher has been emphasizing, and what do they have to do with each other? What is it, really, that we’re all looking at together? And – most importantly - what do you make of it all? What are you able to do with it? A really good test asks you to be creative, to do something with what you’ve learned; to make it your own: so, in the test itself, you learn something; and not just about the material you’ve been studying, but also about you yourself: you learn something about who you are: and in that, you grow. It’s hard work, preparing for a test; but when you do it with that in mind, it becomes easier, because you’re aware of a purpose larger than just getting a good grade: you’re finding out who you are. Today is the first Sunday in Lent (my favorite season of the church year, because it’s the most intentional.) In our church year, Lent is the season in which we test ourselves. In the liturgy for Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent), there’s a short section at the beginning called the Exhortation, in which the celebrant invites the congregation to “the observance of a holy Lent”, and talks about specific ways to do that: prayer, fasting, self-denial, reading and meditating on Scripture; but the first practice mentioned is: self-examination. That’s the hallmark of the season of Lent. The basic idea is to take a good look at who we really are at this stage in the course of our life; and as people of faith, we understand that “who we are” means who we are in relation to God, who created us and is the ground of our being. However we choose to test ourselves in Lent, that’s the real subject matter. In all of this, we find ourselves, as always, following Jesus. The gospel reading for the first Sunday in Lent is always the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness by the devil. This story is in all the first three gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and over the three-year cycle of the lectionary we hear from each one – and, in the story of Jesus, it occurs in the same place in all three. This is important. The temptation by the devil occurs early on, immediately after Jesus’ baptism – at which the voice of God says, this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased – and immediately before Jesus begins his ministry: he does no teaching or healing and performs no miracles before this. The story in Luke begins this way, as we just heard: “After his baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” The Greek word here translated “tempt” primarily means “test”. So this temptation, this test, is not a punishment for something Jesus has done wrong; or a chance occurrence; or something the devil initiated. The Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness specifically in order that he be tested: just as the Holy Spirit leads us to be tested: our church invites us to test ourselves: in ways much smaller, much easier to fit into our lives, than in this story; but the basic track is the same. And this testing is a means by which God invites us to grow, in the knowledge and love of God. Of course, the traditional way in which we test ourselves in Lent is to give something up; although as commonly practiced that’s usually not much of a test. In modern society, giving up something for Lent has become something like making a New Year’s resolution: it’s a quaint social custom that, for most people, isn’t really connected to any coherent system of belief, so it either gets ignored altogether, or fizzles out within a few days, and doesn’t really touch the spirit at all. Well: the point, in Lent, is to test yourself; and giving something up is one way of doing this; but you have to give up something meaningful. The idea is to take on a discipline of some kind or other, which costs you something, forces you to step out of your normal routine. This is the intention: when I give something up I identify an appetite I have – something I like doing, or something I’m in the habit of doing, or something I think I need. I identify that appetite, and I refuse to satisfy it for these six weeks. I do this, not to punish myself for having the appetite, or to prove my endurance; but to see exactly what kind of hold that appetite has on me: to what extent my life – my spirit – is affected by putting it aside; and to see exactly what I’m left with when I feel its pull: to see who I am, and how I respond, at that point. And the stronger the appetite, and the harder it is to refuse it, the more we come to understand that what we’re left with is God, and the power of God, and of God’s love for us. And if we really see that clearly, we see that that’s plenty; in fact that’s what we’ve been looking for all our lives, and God has been there all along. This is the point: I’m more than my appetites: they do not determine who I am.I am who I am in my relationship with God. In our fast – in our test – that’s how we follow Jesus, in his temptation. The devil says to him, You say you are the Son of God? Command this stone to become a loaf of bread, and satisfy your hunger. That’s how you can show me who you are: through your powerful deeds. You say you are the Son of God? Throw yourself down from this pinnacle, because the angels will save you. That’s how you can show me who you are: through what others think of you. Worship me, and I will give you all the kingdoms, and the wealth, of the earth; and that’s how everyone will know who you are: through the magnificence of your possessions. And Jesus says to the devil, That’s all a lie. None of that defines who I am. I am who I am entirely – and only – because of the love of God. Jesus answers each of the three temptations with a quotation from Scripture that lifts up our relation to God. That’s what’s real. That’s the truth of who we are. It’s no different for us. This is the gift of Lent: that as we test ourselves, as we let go of the baggage of our lives, as we shed the illusions of this world, the more clearly we see this glorious truth; and the more firmly we can take hold of it; and live in its truth . Thanks be to God.

When our daughter Betty was a very young child – 2 or 3 years old – she developed a particular strategy for dealing with conflict: more specifically, conflict with her parents; more specifically, when she knew we were having an unfavorable reaction to something she had done. This strategy consisted of her sudden presentation to us of the attitude that, not only was there nothing actually wrong, everything was great! She’d get a big smile on her face (out of nowhere), and her little head would rock from side to side as though she were listening to some catchy little tune that only she could hear, and she’d glance around and her hands would do a little dance as though she was looking for the next wonderful project in her life. And whichever parent was on point would have to guide her gently back to the real subject at hand and resume the process of working it out, of coming to a mutual agreement about what was real. And it wasn’t that we were always right and she was always wrong: of course there were times when we’d misunderstood something, or hadn’t gotten the whole story. The point was that we all had to acknowledge the truth, whatever it might be, and however painful it might be. It had to do with the trust, and the commitment to the truth, that are part of any loving relationship. This is essentially what we’re doing in the season of Lent. In the reading we just heard from 2 Corinthians, St. Paul tells us, “…be reconciled to God.” To reconcile with someone means to return to a right relationship with that person: which means a truthful, honest relationship. Part of being in right relationship with God means being truthful about those times, those ways, we’ve gone off track. We all have them, in our lives: there is certainly no human who is not a sinner. (Sin is the word we use in church to describe the gone-wrongness of this world.) Lent is the season when we give particular attention to the work of reconciling ourselves to God, getting back in right relationship, by acknowledging where we’ve gone wrong.We start this today, the first day of Lent: but on Ash Wednesday we do it particularly by beholding our mortality. Paul writes about the connection between sin and death in Romans chapter 6: “…what advantage did you get from the things for which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death.” It’s not that we do bad things, so God kills us. Rather, sin is how we separate ourselves from the life of God, which is the only true life. This is what Paul means when he says, “So the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In this process of reconciliation – this returning to the truth – we are reconnecting with real life: the life of God; that is the life that is eternal. But as part of this process – in Christ - God has given us a job to do. Earlier in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 Paul writes, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” And then in the verses that lead up to today’s passage, Paul writes: “… All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation….So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”We are the ministers of reconciliation. We are the ones who are called to live out the truth: that we live in a world that survives only on the love of God, a world that is constantly finding ways to choke that love off. We cannot perform the ministry of reconciliation without being reconciled to God ourselves; and in this life that’s a never-ending process, and involves sacrifice that can be very great: in this way it looks to the cross. Ash Wednesday is a hard day; but it’s also a glorious day: because it’s a day of truth. Thanks be to God.

My son Harry, who’s now 24, has always been a good athlete, and was very active in team sports in school and in the Shepaug community programs around Roxbury. Soccer was probably his best sport, but the high school he attended had one of the best soccer programs in the Northeast, and he started there at the bottom of the ladder.. Harry was always able to get by on talent - he was always pretty relaxed about preparation and practice (which drove me crazy) – but when he finally made the JV soccer team his junior year, I could see the beginning of a change in that attitude. And it went to a whole new level the following year, when he made varsity as a senior. Harry was a benchwarmer on that team – he only got into about half the games – but he was more proud of having made varsity soccer than of anything else in his high school career. And there are things he learned in that process that have (thankfully) stayed with him: the importance of staying in good shape and of eating right, and how that affects everything you do, not just sports; and much more importantly, the result you get – and how you feel about yourself - when you give your best effort, and do that consistently. A few days ago I asked him what it was that had changed his approach, what motivated him, that last year in high school. I thought it was because of his coach, who I know Harry respected a lot. But he said no, the coach had something to do with it; but it was more the team, it was just what you did when you were on varsity. They all had that same commitment, the same understanding of what it was they were all doing together: and they all lifted up each other . I asked Harry that question because I thought it might relate to something in today’s gospel: something essential about what it means to be a Christian. We’re about to enter the season of Lent – our annual checkup – and it’s good to have this kind of thing in mind.Today’s reading from Luke’s gospel, and the one we heard last week, are from what’s traditionally called the Sermon on the Plain. Jesus speaks to his disciples, with a great crowd around them, “on a level place” (in the King James Version it’s “a plain”, hence the name.) In the Old Testament, in the prophets, a “level” or “flat” place often means a troubled place: one of suffering, mourning, hunger, idolatry, disgrace. So in speaking to us there, Jesus is speaking, not from a holy place, not up on a mountain where people (including Jesus) usually go to be with God, but down here in this messy, gone-wrong world that we live in every day, and where we don’t think to look for God’s presence because how could God possibly be here?Jesus begins today’s passage, “I say to you that listen….” So he’s not really speaking to everyone: he’s addressing a group within the crowd (those that listen.) In the gospel story it’s the disciples; but of course in God’s truth Jesus is speaking to us. We are among those that listen to Jesus Christ, because we know that Christ is to be paid attention to. In his voice we hear the voice of God.We are listening in the first place because each one of us has had some personal experience, some way or other, of the love of God in Christ,. That’s why we’re the ones that listen. We might each describe that experience in a different way, but that’s what it is. And thank God.Now. It’s important to remind ourselves of what we mean when we talk about the love of God. In the New Testament, there are four Greek words which we translate into English as “love”. One is philia, which means friendship; one is eros, which means romantic or sexual love; one is storge, which is the love of one family member for another (this reminds me of a line from the comedian Martin Mull, that when he sees a sign that says “Family Restaurant” he knows it’s full of tables for six and everybody’s yelling at each other.)But by far the most important word in the New Testament that we translate as “love” is agape. This is the word that Jesus uses, and it is the love that God has for humankind. This love is infinite, and unreserved: given without any expectation of getting anything in return, and it’s totally over-the-top. It’s love for lost, and fallen, people; that’s to say, for all people. And this love is active: agapedoes things, and it’s self-starting. This is the love that Jesus describes in the parable of the Prodigal Son: the love of the father who suddenly sees his wayward, wastrel son, who’s been gone from home for years on God knows how many self-destructive fool’s errands, and as soon as the father catches sight of him from far off, without knowing anything about his present state of mind, whether he’s repentant or regretful or more stubborn than ever, runs toward and grabs him in a bear hug and shouts orders to his servants to prepare the biggest party they’ve ever had, to welcome home his son, whom he loves more than ever.This is the love that Jesus calls us in today’s gospel to practice, to live out. Jesus says to us that listen that we have a higher responsibility than those who, for whatever reason, don’t listen; those who don’t hear that voice. This is the standard he sets for those that listen to him. If we love only those who love us, if we lend only to those from whom we expect to be paid back, if we do good only to those who do good to us: none of that is the love of God. When we ignore the truth of the love of God for us, and within us, we are not living up to our responsibility. This is where it relates to Harry’s experience on the soccer team: this is what you do when you’re on the varsity. And let’s just pause here to enjoy a big laugh at what Jesus’ varsity looks like: this is the most unlikely-looking “varsity” in the universe; and includes people who don’t even know they’re on the squad.This is the responsibility of us who listen. And there’s actually a practical example in today’s Old Testament reading from Genesis, the climax of the story of Joseph and his brothers. This was a conflicted family: Joseph was favored over his brothers by their father Jacob, he bragged to his brothers about dreams he had of a future in which he would lord it over them; and they gave it back in spades, plotted to kill him and then in their mercy merely sold him into slavery in Egypt. And many years later they come to Egypt to buy grain because of the famine in their land, and have to apply for this to Joseph, who’s become very powerful and whom they don’t recognize, it’s been so long. And in today’s reading Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, and proclaims the hand of God to have been at work in the whole thing: it was God who sent me here, he says, to preserve life – to preserve your life and your descendants’, by making me lord of all Egypt. In this proclamation of the presence of God, Joseph brings the love of God into all their lives – this is loving your enemies – and in so doing rids himself of the bitterness and desire for revenge that would naturally be his, and frees them from the guilt and shame and fear that would naturally be theirs. This is the kind of thing that can happen when agape– the love of God – flows through us. And impossible as it seems we can live up to it – as when Jesus tells us to love our enemies – on those times when we try, when we just let it happen, new worlds open; and we can see what Jesus means when he says, My yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Thanks be to God.

Does anyone recognize the name Ernest Shackleton? Shackleton was an English explorer who was the central figure in one of the greatest adventures in human history. In 1914 he and his crew of 28 set sail for Antarctica, intending to be the first people ever to cross that continent on foot. But when they got near, inside the Antarctic Circle, their ship became trapped in pack ice and crushed before they got to shore. To make a long and amazing story short, the crew survived for nearly a year on ice floes and an uninhabited island, before Shackleton decided their only chance of survival was for a small party to cross 700 miles of stormy open ocean in a lifeboat to a whaling station on an island in the Southern Atlantic, where they could get help. It took them two weeks, and when they got there they had to cross a mountain range, thousands of feet high, covered with glaciers, to get to the station. This was a effort that demanded the skills of a professional climbers; and these were sailors, and the only equipment they had was fifty feet of rope and a hatchet. And they did it. They got to the whaling station, got a big boat, and went back and rescued the whole crew, returning to England without losing a single man. Twenty years ago three very famous climbers – with a support team and modern equipment - retraced their steps over that mountain range; and were properly awestruck at what those men had done with, essentially, nothing but the power of the human spirit. Because that was all they had. And it was enough. We heard a reading just now from the book of the Acts of the Apostles. It’s not too great a stretch of the imagination to see parallels between Shackleton’s party and the disciples, now become apostles: a small group, in what was certainly for followers of Jesus Christ a forbidding, sometimes lethally hostile environment; and they were on a mission that their lives depended on: perhaps in a different sense than that of Shackleton and his men, but it’s at least as truthful of the apostles: of their new lives in Christ. And they didn’t have the equipment that we do: no institutional church, no set liturgies (in the way we know them), no New Testament to guide them – no gospels, no letters of Paul, those would be written over the next 50-60 years. They were creating the church, making it up as they went along. All they had was the Holy Spirit, and that was enough. More than enough. One of the great things about the book of Acts is that it gives us a window on the church at this most elemental level – simply the ekklesia, “those who are called out” – before it accumulated all the trappings: the buildings, the theologizing, all the human dressings up of the life of the Spirit of God in Christ: some of which has been great, some of which has been less so. We have a particularly great example of the pure life of the Spirit at this earliest stage of the church in today’s reading. And it’s particularly appropriate that our church asks us to hear it today, because it’s a story about the gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism; and today is the first Sunday after the Epiphany, when every year we hear the gospel story of the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus, at his baptism.This little snippet that we heard from Acts is from the middle of chapter 8, which tells of the conversion of the Samaritans. The apostles are beginning to spread the good news of Jesus Christ outward from Jerusalem, where they have been concentrated.Now. Any time we hear the word “Samaria” or “Samaritan” in the New Testament it should be a red flag. Samaria was a region halfway between Galilee and Judea, smack dab in the middle of the land of Israel. Notwithstanding that, among the people of Israel, Samaritans were outcastes. They considered themselves faithful Jews, but to everybody else in the nation of Israel they practiced a mongrelized form of the religion, and were definitely not part of God’s chosen people, unclean, despised, and utterly shunned. This is why, in the gospel of John, when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, she is amazed – his disciples are amazed - that he speaks to her at all, let alone gives her his complete attention. This is why the parable of the good Samaritan would have been so shocking to the people of Jesus’ day: as it is not to us. But imagine if Jesus, telling that parable to us here today, had made the moral hero of the story not a Samaritan, but a member of ISIS, or Al Qaeda. That’s how extreme it was. The whole story that we heard today from Acts is told in just three verses (classic biblical conciseness.) In the first verse, when the apostles back in Jerusalem hear that “Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.” That’s to say, they hear that the Samaritans have been converted and baptized, but many generations of hatred and contempt for Samaritans have taught them not to trust this news; and they send their two heaviest hitters to check it out. And in the second verse (as we heard), Peter and John “went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Now, this is the rub. This seems directly contrary to what the church has always taught: that the gift of the Holy Spirit comes at baptism. It’s not conditional, on anything, it doesn’t depend on the faith or the worthiness of the minister, or the age or awareness of the person being baptized. God gives the Holy Sprit at baptism. But this verse very clearly states otherwise.So what’s going on here?I found a commentary that speaks precisely to this problem, written by a Lutheran pastor and theologian named Gerhard Krodel, which I think is the truth. He says, it’s not what’s happening to he Samaritans that we should be paying attention to in this story, it’s what’s happening to the apostles: to their understanding that God in Christ works: in ways that break down the boundaries that we create. Krodel writes that the separation of baptism from the gift of the Holy Spirit, in this story, is an act of God; which God does to break down barriers. God addresses the need for Peter and John to lay hands on the Samaritans so that they would be part of the realization that we are all one in Christ: obliterating the enmity between faithful Jews and faithful Samaritans; that they – the apostles -would experience the radical grace of God in showing that God works outside the limits, the rules, the definitions we humans will not stop creating, and insisting that God abide by. This is a story of the Spirit that, as Jesus tells us, blows where it chooses, and we hear the sound of it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it goes. All we know is that it’s real, and its power is infinite. This is the Spirit that can break down all the barriers we face in this world -can cross an ocean, and scale an icy mountain range –– on nothing but its own power. This is the gift of the Holy Spirit that we receive from God in Christ. Thanks be to God.

For some years now, the population at church on Christmas morning has been much lower than it used to be. This is not necessarily to be bemoaned: the population on Christmas Eve has gotten higher. It’s something of a cultural shift. But, whether we’re here Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, we’re looking in the same direction; and as long as that’s what we’re doing, whichever time we choose for it is beside the point. There is a difference, though, between the experience of worship on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, the predominant feeling is still one of anticipation, as it is throughout Advent, in a way that evolves over that season. Strictly speaking, on Christmas Eve we’re still in Advent: the gift has not yet arrived. There’s excitement in church on Christmas Eve, because we know the gift’s going to arrive, in just a few hours; but it’s still not quite here yet. So the concept of Santa Claus, as a symbol, has real meaning. Today is different: the gift has arrived. We have it. The anticipation, and the excitement, have evolved into joy. And I’ve been using the word “gift” because of course I’m talking about the great gift of God in Christ, who is now among us. If you want to talk about a gift that keeps on giving, this is the ultimate. And in church, we do talk about that gift; it’s one of the things we’re here to do: to give thanks: always to give thanks; especially for this unimaginable gift. I think it’s wonderfully appropriate that in the lectionary for today, Christmas Day, our church chooses to put before us a passage from the letter to Titus. Titus, a bit player among the big stars of the New Testament if ever there was one, off somewhere in the shrubbery of the letters of Paul; very short letter; almost never gets read in church. And of course it’s just all that that makes it appropriately featured on one of the two greatest celebrations of the Christian year: because it’s just one more example of how God always works through the small, the barely noticeable, the completely unexpected. My ways are not your ways, says the Lord, over and over and over. Titus was one of Paul’s corps of missionaries, like Timothy: the ones he sent to minister to churches in the eastern Mediterranean he had founded and moved on from (in Titus’ case, it was the church on the island of Crete.) Paul sent these lieutenants to make sure those churches were still on the right track, following the gospel that he, Paul, had taught them. So the letter to Titus, like other such in the New Testament, contains specific instructions on what Titus is to do: what to look for, mistakes he’d heard of that needed correcting, likely pitfalls and how to avoid them, how to handle certain people. The passage we heard today is a little capsule summary of the gift of God in Christ: in the words of the letter, a gift of “rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior”; and this has happened (again, from the letter) “not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to [God’s] mercy.” You could call that the gospel in a nutshell. But because to churchgoing Christians these are all such familiar phrases, it can sound like a formula, kneejerk, lifeless, and our eyes glaze over and we think Yeah, yeah, we got that already; and the gift is dead, because what it means for our lives is lost. But we can get an idea of just what it does mean from the two verses that immediately precede the passage we heard today. Titus receives instructions from Paul concerning the church in Crete: “Remind them…to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone.” That’s great, isn’t it? Who could quarrel with that? We probably like to think we know this already; but do we actually live that way? Really? Or just when we feel like it? Or is it okay to not live that way when we decide, as we so often do, that the other person doesn’t deserve it? And – truthfully – how often do we fail to live this way especially among the people who are closest to us? Our families? Those with whom we work? These words describe the life of the gospel, day in and day out, that God calls us to in Jesus Christ. And in the very next verse – the one right before today’s reading – the writer attests that this life is a gift, that he has received in his own life: “For we ourselves were once foolish, passing our days in malice and envy, despicable, hating one another.” And then the first verse we heard today: “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us….” In Jesus Christ God shows us the way, as a pure gift. And through this gift we are freed from the shackles of anger and fear and hatred and envy and pride; freed into a kind of joy that knows no bounds, because of the purity of the gift, that God gives so freely. This kind of joy is embodied beautifully in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. It’s one of the reasons A Christmas Carolinstantly became, and has stayed, so popular, because it captures so well this aspect of the spirit of Christmas. Near the end of the story, once Scrooge makes his peace with the three Ghosts that have visited him, and vows to turn his life around in the true Spirit of Christmas, he is filled with a giddy joy that nothing in the story has prepared us for, from him, it’s completely out of character, but makes perfect sense to us, when we see it: a joy that, finally, alone in his room though he be, has him laughing out loud, laughing at nothing at all, laughing until tears are rolling down his cheeks; because, by keeping Christmas in his heart (as he puts it), he is free of the chains he forged in life; and it’s a gift. That’s the gift of God in Christ, at Christmas. Whatever else turns up under the tree, we’re good to go. Thanks be to God.

I grew up in northern Virginia, on a farm between two tiny towns a couple of miles apart. Each had a population of a few hundred, each had an Episcopal church, and there was a single minister (we didn’t call them priests in those days) who served both. On Sunday mornings there was an eight o’clock service at one, and a ten o’clock at the other. At Christmastime, the eight o’clock church had the Christmas Eve service, and the ten o’clock had worship Christmas morning. When my brothers and I got into our teens, our family switched from going Christmas Day to Christmas Eve, and it stayed that way for the rest of our parents’ lives.I remember a couple of things about that Christmas Eve service. For most of the years we went, the minister was a sweet old guy with a very gentle, benevolent way about him, but who delivered his sermons in a kind of sing-song drone that had a truly hypnotic effect (and not hypnotic/enthralling, but hypnotic/”You are getting sleepy, very sleepy”); so the “Amen” at the end was like the snap of the fingers that brought you up out of the trance you suddenly realized you’d been in for the past ten minutes, and – as in actual hypnosis - you remembered nothing of what had happened in that time. So his sermons might actually have been brilliant; or it might have been the same sermon every year, but it was impossible to know. But I also remember the unique touchstone quality of that service. People reconnected, and in a particular way. The congregation was people I’d grown up around, and for some it was the only time all year that we saw each other, people like me who’d gone away to college and then to jobs in different parts of the country. But the social dimension had deeper roots: we came back home for Christmas, and we were there in church on Christmas Eve, partly to see who we all were now, with another year under our belts. And we were drawn to this context – this service of worship - to do that; because we all had some sense (and mine was pretty dim at that point) that the story of this little baby is like the core of a nuclear reactor: that it’s where everything in life starts: the story of the man who spoke, and speaks, the capital-T Truth; and who had, and has, the power to transform lives, who shows us who we really are. So it’s natural to feel the need to refresh ourselves in this story.And when we hear this story on Christmas Eve, it has a different feel than it does at any other time, both the story and what we do together around it. By definition the eve of something carries with it the awareness of the next day: the sense of pure possibility. And in Christ that possibility is new life, and joy, and wonder. And it’s real. There’s an indication of what I’m talking about in the gospel reading we just heard. Luke’s story of the Nativity is so beautiful, and so familiar (we hear it every Christmas Eve), that it’s easy for us to be deaf to its live voice. An angel of the Lord announces to the shepherds the birth of Jesus as the decisive act of God in human history; and then a huge crowd of angels shows up and sings praise to God: it’s quite a production; and when they all go back to heaven the shepherds say, We’ve got to get to Bethlehem and see, as they put it, “this thing that has taken place.” So they don’t know exactly what it is that’s happened, and is happening, but they know it’s something: pure possibility. And they find Mary and Joseph and the baby in the manger, which confirms that the angel had told them. And once it’s confirmed, the shepherds tell everyone who’s around, anyone who’ll listen, what’s happened. And this is the point: Luke tells us that “…all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” The contrast here is subtle, but very sharp. All who heard the shepherds were amazed: they’re reacting as spectators. Getting plenty of bang for the buck, but spectators. Mary treasures the shepherds’ words and ponders them in her heart. She knows that what’s happened is more than just a spectacle, more than just a awe-inspiring demonstration of God’s presence and power. And as she has from the start, Mary takes it all very personally. She understands that what she’s heard has to do with real life. She treasures the words of the shepherds: she feels the richness of their meaning for her, and for everyone. And she ponders them in her heart: do you hear the awareness of possibility there? Mary is looking to tomorrow: to what those words mean for her life going forward; and for the lives of every human being, from now on. This is what our church calls us to do, at Christmas: to not be spectators, but to take it personally: to treasure these words of the Christmas story, and ponder them in our hearts: the story that this little baby is the Light of the World, and is really born into each of our lives to light us to who we really are: to new life,, and joy, and wonder. Thanks be to God.

​12/23/18(Micah 5:2-5a; Canticle 15; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-55) “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” I have a friend who many years ago was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, and in 1981 the paper assigned him to cover the first landing of the very first space shuttle, the Columbia, at Edwards Air Force Base in California. That first flight only lasted two days; probably the most important mission it had was to get up and down safely, because it was the first. The landing was scheduled to take place in the morning, and at the appointed time my friend and the large crowd of other reporters who had been invited to witness this were gathered outside by the landing strip where the shuttle was to touch down. They had been told the direction the shuttle would be coming in from, so they were all looking that way. They were there as professionals - to do a job, to report the event – but there was also among them all an eager anticipation: this was something that had never happened before, and they were going to be the first ones to see it. They were all looking off to the horizon, straining to be the first to catch sight of the shuttle. But the time it was scheduled to appear came and went, minutes passed, and there was a mounting anxiety that something had gone wrong. And then suddenly, from the back of the crowd there on the tarmac, someone shouted Hey, there it is; and every head whipped around, and there, coming from the opposite direction than the one they had been told to look, was Columbia, less than a mile away, almost on them, lumbering awkwardly down. And my friend said that that he and that whole crowd of reporters, serious, sober professionals there to do what years of experience had prepared them for, to give a clear, precise account of the details of the event: all of that instantly went away, and he said it was like they were all of a sudden like kids at a high school football game: jumping up and down, pumping their fists in the air, shouting Come on baby, get her down; rooting Columbia home. And it was the fact that they’d been taken by surprise, that the ship was coming from a completely unexpected direction, and was all of a sudden right in front of them, that instantly vaporized the constraints of professional behavior, and set free a reaction that was completely spontaneous, genuine, and absolutely truthful, from the deepest, most vulnerable part of their humanity. And I’m sure that, because of that, at least some of them must have left that occasion slightly changed people. We live in a world that we think we know. We think we’ve taken the measure of it. We know what to expect. We look in certain directions. We behave in certain ways. And then God does something that we’re not looking for, and we’re taken out of what we know, if we’re honest with ourselves; and if we have the eyes to see it, we face God’s presence, here and now – thank God; and our spirit leaps. This is what happens to Elizabeth in today’s reading from the gospel of Luke. In Christian tradition the encounter between Mary and Elizabeth is known as the Visitation. It’s in the middle of the larger story that Luke tells of the birth of Jesus Christ, and because of that, we usually don’t give this particular episode the attention it deserves. But there’s something unique and distinctive about Christian spirituality that this story reveals. Elizabeth is the wife of the priest Zechariah. They are childless, which was considered a disgrace, and the woman was always the one held responsible: and in the language of the Bible, Elizabeth is “barren”. (Think about the implications of that word: it’s not just a synonym for “childless”.) Luke tells us that they are advanced in years, which probably means they’re in their forties, and at that time certainly meant that the possibility that they might have children in the future was out of the question. But an angel of the Lord appears to Zechariah and tells him that his wife Elizabeth will bear a son, for whom God has appointed a special task. And Elizabeth does conceive a child, and she understands this to be the work of God: “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.” So God, through this completely unexpected event, has started a particular movement of the Spirit in her. The angel Gabriel then visits Mary, and tells her she’s going to bear a son for whom God has appointed a special task of his own; and when Mary says How can this be, I’m a virgin, Gabriel says, essentially, it can be because God is doing it, nothing is impossible with God, and tells Mary about her cousin Elizabeth, an old woman, now pregnant. That’s to say, in the language of the time, she’s no longer barren: it’s not simply that there’s a physical process, that we’re all familiar with, going on in her, and we think, Oh, Elizabeth’s pregnant, isn’t that nice: something fundamental about who she is has changed. So Mary goes immediately to her kinsman, to explore with her, because she’s the only one who can understand it, this utterly new and inexplicable thing that’s happening to each of them. And this is where we learn something unique and distinctive about the Christian life, as Luke tells the story: Mary goes “with haste” to Elizabeth; and when Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice, before Mary can tell her anything at all, Elizabeth understands what’s happened, and what’s happening: the child in her womb, the new life in her, “leaps”; Elizabeth is “filled with the Holy Spirit”, and she “exclaims with a loud cry”: “Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” This question – this thought - is a leap of the Spirit, in two ways. The first is a leap to a new dimension of thankfulness. “Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” Elizabeth understands that this – the Visitation, Mary’s coming to her – is a gift, a gift of God, which means it’s a pure gift: she’s done nothing to deserve it. She understands that there’s nothing anyone could possibly do to deserve such a gift. And since she knows the gift is pure gift, Elizabeth’s thankfulness is pure thankfulness: there’s no self-congratulation, no self-justification, nothing held back: she gives herself fully to what God is doing. That’s one leap of the spirit. The other is that, in this question, Elizabeth looks to the future: Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? There’s a sense of mission here: Elizabeth understands that there’s a reason that this has happened, a reason that God has given her this gift, a reason that involves her, and her life. She doesn’t know yet what it is; but she understands that it is her task now to find out. This is a call. This is the culmination of Advent, where we stand with Elizabeth. The season surprises us, astonishes us: yanks us out of dark, desolate barrenness, to radiant, excited, whole-souled thankfulness at the gift that God has given us, each one of us: thankfulness which makes us free, free to answer the question we put to ourselves: Why has this happened to me, that our Lord comes to me? It is in that awe, and wonder, and joy, that we approach the birth of Christ. Thanks be to God.

When actors are working on a play, they usually talk in terms of actions: what am I doing in this scene? I’m going to get in my father’s face and stay there until he finally listens to me. I’m going to swallow my fear and ask this girl to marry me. I’m going to joke my way out of the trouble I’m in. The words of any script just lie there flat unless you’re really doing something through them (this holds for the worship service as well.) And when something feels like it’s not right in a performance, usually something’s gone off track in that area, and you go back to square one, and ask yourself is, Okay, what am I doing here? That’s how to reconnect to the character. Because what we do and how we do it is the truest reflection of who we are. I’m thinking about this because of today’s gospel reading. What should we do? In this passage we hear that question three times. This reading immediately follows the one we heard last week: John the Baptist, in the wilderness, preaching repentance (turning in a new direction.) And people are flocking to hear him because they know something’s gone off track in their lives, they hear the call to repentance, and they know that’s what they need. Today, in typically subtle, diplomatic language, John tells them a what that means: he says, You brood of vipers! Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Don’t think that just because you say you buy into this, that takes care of the problem. Do something about it. What you do shows who you really are.Hence the question, What should we do? Three different groups of people ask it, and each gets a different answer. The reason why relates to what we’re doing here today. This is the third Sunday of Advent. In church tradition it’s known as Gaudete Sunday. Gaudeteis Latin for “rejoice”, and today that is what our church calls us to do. In the progress of the season of Advent this is the day when we look to the light that is coming toward us, and we rejoice, we rejoice in the One who is coming into the world, and will very soon be among us. This rejoicing is signified by the rose-colored candle that we light today on the Advent wreath. We hear the word “rejoice” –as an imperative, a call - in two of today’s readings. At the beginning of the passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” Rejoice in the Lord: let us think about who Jesus is, and what Jesus does, in our hearts, in our spirits; and let us rejoice. Our faith calls us to do that today. We hear it from a somewhat different angle in the prophecy of Zephaniah: “Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” This is particularly striking from Zephaniah, because these words are such an about-face from the rest of that book: Zephaniah is what people think of as a typical Old Testament prophet: full of judgment: judgment in the sense of a guilty verdict being delivered (there’s another sense of the word, which I’ll get back to.) Here’s an example from Zephaniah chapter 1: “I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth, says the Lord.” How’s that for a sentence being pronounced? The book is full of that kind of judgment; and lest you think that’s just old-fashioned, here’s a verse from chapter 1 that could have been written yesterday: “I will punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs, those who say in their hearts, ‘The Lord will not do good, nor will he do harm.’ “ Does not that kind of indifference to God seem entirely modern? (And isn’t it comforting to know that it’s not?) But finally, says Zephaniah – today’s reading is from the very end of the book – finally we are to rejoice, to sing aloud, and shout; because, as we heard today, “[t]he Lord has taken away the judgments against you” (again, judgment as a verdict of guilty.) Today’s gospel story, however, says nothing literally about rejoicing: it seems rather to point in the other direction; but in fact it has very much to do with why we rejoice today. It has to do with judgment in a different sense of the word. In this passage from Luke, John the Baptist tells people about the one who is to come: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire”; and then Luke immediately follows this with “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to people.” Burning the chaff with unquenchable fire? Most of us probably don’t hear this as good news. We don’t hear it as good news because it sounds like judgment of the kind we’re used to hearing in the Bible, the judgment that pronounces sentence. So what we hear is, the coming one is going to identify who’s bad and who’s good – who’s naughty and who’s nice - and the good ones are going to make it into the granary and the bad ones are going to get what’s coming to them. Finally, and for good. But this is a misunderstanding. The novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn once wrote something that speaks directly to why. He said, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” And this is where a different sense of the word “judgment” comes in. To judge something also means to see it for what it really is. God sees that line that cuts through our hearts, and God knows who God created us to be. God knows who we really are: that’s the wheat; and God knows how each of us goes off track in this broken world: that’s the chaff. It’s not us and them: it’s just us. John tells of the Coming One who will separate the wheat from the chaff: he will lead us back to who we really are, each in our own way. Christ’s judgment is redemption: re-deeming, re-valuing – valuing us for who we truly are. That’s why the question, What should we do, gets different answers, depending on who’s asking. What should we do, asks the crowd – the ordinary people? John tells them, Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise. He’s saying, stop your willful blindness to the needs of others because you’re so wrapped up in your own security. It’s essentially a restatement of the second great commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. This is what you do about that. Simple. Hard, sometimes. But simple.What should we do, say the tax collectors? John tells them, Don’t charge people more than you are supposed to. In that society that’s what tax collectors did. They collected taxes for Rome and routinely overcharged people, for their own profit, knowing they could get away with it because no one could challenge the power of the empire. This is why people hated tax collectors, why they’re prime examples in all the gospels as the lowest of the low.What should we do, say the soldiers? John tells them, stop shaking people down. That was standard practice: because they had power, Roman soldiers used extortion and blackmail to enrich themselves. With each group, John addresses the particular sin that leads them away from who they truly are. And they know that’s what’s happened: that’s why they’re asking the question: because we all want redemption; we all know we need redemption; and we know we can’t get it by ourselves. God sees who we really are. That’s the judgment of God in Christ. God comes into the world to live that judgment: to show us – each of us – who we really are, and call us to live that way. This is what we rejoice in, today. What should we do? Who are we, really? Today we rejoice that there’s an answer. Thanks be to God.